PonyOfWar

To expand on that, both religions were, let’s say, “heavily encouraged” by the rulers. But Akhenaten was pretty much just one guy who wanted to establish his crazy new religious ideas, while the Rashidun caliphate brought with it an entire ruling class already based on Islam. The population was already Abrahamic-monotheistic at that point as well (Christian), so I guess they had a bit of an easier time.

So what conclusion do you draw from this? If humans can’t be trusted to make any judgement, literally anything should be considered to be capable of suffering, including pebbles, rainbows and paper bags? Seems like an impractical way of living.

Where do we draw the line though? Humans assign emotions to all kinds of inanimate things: plush animals, the sky, dead people, fictional characters etc. We can’t give all of those the rights of a conscious being, so we need to have some kind of objective way to look at it.

Fundamentally impossible to know. I’m not sure how you’d even find a definition for “suffering” that would apply to non-living entities. I don’t think the comparison to animals really holds up though. Humans are animals and can feel pain, so of course the base assumption for other animals should be that they do as well. To claim otherwise, the burden should be to prove that they don’t. Meanwhile, Humans are fundamentally nothing like an LLM, a program running on silicon predicting text responses based on a massive dataset.